Is this... bad? ("The plexmediaserver port currently does not have a maintainer")

[winnielinnie]

When updating the packages in my Plex jail (not a Plugin, but a manually created Jail) I receive the following message upon the package plexmediaserver being updated:

"The plexmediaserver port currently does not have a maintainer. As a result, it is more likely to have unresolved issues, not be up-to-date, or even be removed in the future."​

Is this something to be concerned about? I'm not familiar with the history of FreeBSD ports and how often they lose maintainers and/or re-acquire adoption.

TrueNAS Core 12.0-U8 (12.2-RELEASE-p12)

All Jails are 12.2-RELEASE-p15

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

If no new maintainer steps up the port will eventually be retired. If it continues to build without problems, in a year or two. If the build fails and no volunteer can be found, earlier.

 

[winnielinnie]

That makes for an awkward situation for TrueNAS Core users. (Current and long-term.)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Let's hope someone who uses this Plex thing takes the helm.

I used to and still maintain some ports, but sorry, not interested in this one. acme-dns is the next thing where the porting has already been done but the creator does not want the maintainer duty. So I am going to submit it upstream. I build infrastructure, not applications.

 

[Samuel Tai]

@winnielinnie, you could look into running the official Plex Docker container in a Linux VM. I do that, and it's always updated on startup, if you use the :public tag.

 

[winnielinnie]

The reason I love Jails / iocage so much is that it's very light. flexible, and easy to manage, but especially because there's no need to spin up a virtual machine just to run a single application from a container.

I currently run zero VMs, and never planned to run any. (No need to.)

@Patrick M. Hausen: I'll send you a $25 giftcard for Starbucks if you become the plexmediaserver port maintainer. Who doesn't love a good iced coffee?

 

[Jailer]

This unfortunately is the downside of FreeBSD. The users are at the mercy of the generosity of port maintainers to keep software running on FreeBSD. FreeBSD doesn't have near the support or adoption that Linux does and with containers being all the rage now I fear this will be the death knell for my favorite OS. If I were smarter I'd volunteer to take the Plex port on but alas I can't even write a shell script.

As soon as I saw Scale I predicted that Core will be a dead project at some point in the near future. It's unfortunate because I really like FreeBSD and jails and TrueNAS makes managing jails super easy.

Yes I understand I am catastrophizing but I do see a day when iX makes a business decision to stop supporting Core and going strictly with Scale. It doesn't make any sense at all to have two different but so similar products with completely different OS under the hood. The decision to develop Scale with it's (Linux) tremendous acceptance and industry support was a strategic one, and one that will guide the direction that iX goes in the future.

 

[winnielinnie]

Yes I understand I am catastrophizing but I do see a day when iX makes a business decision to stop supporting Core and going strictly with Scale. It doesn't make any sense at all to have two different but so similar products with completely different OS under the hood.

I feel there are already hints of this, when fixed bugs and to-be-implemented features are tagged for a SCALE version, and only later (or not at all) a Core version.